SCALP share new track “EGODEATH”
Coining the phrase “WEST COAST DEATH VIOLENCE” as a tagline for your band is as intimidating as it is ballsy, considering the long list of heavy music gods that have influenced legions. But SCALP stands tall, channeling predecessors like Nails, The Endless Blockade, Iron Lung, HM-2 leaning death metal, the work of the Burdette brothers (specifically Deathreat and His Hero is Gone), Craft and Dead in the Dirt, reducing them to a molten plasma that swallows or leaves everything engulfed in flames. In an era where hardcore has abandoned rules but is still a patchwork of pastiche, SCALP is blazing trails and redefining extremity.
With Not Worthy of Human Compassion [pre-order], the band’s third LP and latest for the venerable Closed Casket Activities, SCALP return to the catchy, vein-bulging nihilism that marked their debut Domestic Extremity, adding in the technicality found on the follow-up Black Tar. The result is a flag-flown high and an amalgamation of the maximal elements of heavy music– a full-on siege by way of death metal, grind, d-beat and powerviolence seen through the blood-soaked and grimy lens of negative hardcore. Musicality aside, a book called The Lucifer Effect cast a long shadow on the record. Written by Philip Zimbardo, the tome details the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, examining the human factors that could make anyone susceptible to paths into shadow. Nothing is more terrifying than an evil genius, and Not Worthy of Human Compassion is as maniacal as it is learned, calculating and precise as a cut from a scalpel.
The album's punchy second single "EGODEATH" is out today. The band says the song is "...total loss of control. In the heat of unswerving lunacy, only one way out is permanent. Fast transitions building adrenaline with an ending that teases relief."
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